Min Jin Lee is a recipient of fellowships in Fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2018-2019). Her novel Pachinko (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and one of the New York Times' "Ten Best Books of 2017." A New York Times bestseller, Pachinko was also one of the "Ten Best Books" of the year for BBC and the New York Public Library, and a "best international fiction" pick for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In total, it was on over seventy-five best books of the year lists, including NPR, PBS, and CNN, and it was a selection for Now Read This, the joint book club of PBS NewsHour and the New York Times. Pachinko will be translated into twenty-seven languages. Lee's debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was one of the best books of the year for the Times of London, NPR's Fresh Air, and USA Today, and it was a national bestseller.From Lee's 2017 Q&A with NPR's Lynn Neary:
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Min Jin Lee got the idea for her second novel when she was still a college student. The year was 1989. She went to a lecture by an American missionary who had been working with the Korean-Japanese in Japan. He told a story about a 13-year-old boy who committed suicide. After his death, the boy's parents found his school yearbook.Visit Min Jin Lee's website.
MIN JIN LEE: And in this yearbook, several of his classmates had written things like, go back to your country. And they had written the words, die, die, die. And the parents were born in Japan. The boy was born in Japan. And I think that story just really could not be more fixed into my brain.
NEARY: Lee, a Korean-American, was determined to tell the history of Koreans in Japan. She lived there for a while and interviewed many Korean-Japanese to get a sense of what life was like for them. She decided to tell their history through a multigenerational family story.
LEE: I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history's not that interesting sometimes. And it can feel a bit medicinal. And I wanted it to be really fun, and I wanted it to be really exciting. And I also wanted...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue